Find/change Makes Quick Work of Text Editing
Really, it does.
Let’s say you just imported data from Excel into an InDesign Table, and low and behold, you’re noticing lots of what appears to be gibberish. Strange characters make your text look like a bunch of “expletive deleteds.” Some of the “garbage” may actually be html code if your text originated on the internet. If it has characters like <p>, <strong>, or </strong>, these are html codes that are mixed in with the text.
In InDesign, go to Edit<Find/Change to bring up the dialog. The tab on the far left pertains to finding and changing any string of text, even “invisible characters,” such as a paragraph return, a space or a tab. You can change the found text to any other string of text or invisible character. You’ll find a chart with the special character codes on pages 421-423 of the InDesign Bible.
The find and change technique makes it easy to quickly search and replace double spaces with single spaces, remove extra paragraph returns by changing to “nothing” so that you can instead insert space above or below the paragraphs and changes crazy codes like (') which is html for an apostrophe (‘).
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